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de Pablo Group

Su-Mi Hur

  • Postdoctoral Researcher

  • Contact: sumi@uchicago.edu
    773.834.2912
  • Office Location:
    Searle Laboratory 105
    5735 South Ellis Avenue
    Chicago, IL 60637

Su-Mi Hur obtained her BS and MS degrees in the Chemical Engineering Department at Seoul National University in South Korea. For her MS degree, she developed a control algorithm, Model-on-Demand Model Predictive Control, and, advised by Professor Hyun-ku Rhee, applied it to a semibatch copolymerization reactor. She shifted her interest to polymer physics and received her PhD from the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the supervision of Professor Glenn H. Fredrickson in 2012. During her graduate studies, her research focused on developing improved block copolymer lithography techniques by means of self-consistent field theory (SCFT) simulations. She has developed a powerful suite of field-based computer simulation tools for exploring the self-assembly of complex polymeric fluids under confinement and has studied various polymeric systems. Su-Mi has also extended directed self-assembly methods to mixed polymer brushes and demonstrated that lateral confinement and grafting density modulation can induce technologically attractive lateral phase separation.

Su-Mi Hur received an IBM PhD fellowship in two years (2009–2010). As a part of the fellowship program, she interned at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, guided by an IBM mentor, Dr. Jed Pitera. She was awarded the 2010 Doh Wonsuk Memorial Award, given by the Korean Institute of Chemical Engineering US Chapter to the best Korean PhD student who studies chemical engineering-related areas in the US.

She continued her research career as a postdoctoral associate in Professor Juan de Pablo’s group at University of Wisconsin-Madison and moved to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago along with the group. Her current research project is developing an efficient model for solvent assisted directed self-assembly in block copolymer thin film.